Sunday, November 19, 2017

The war
between Nazi German and the Soviet Union was the largest land campaign of WWII
and it involved millions of troops and tens of thousands of tanks and
warplanes.

In the East
the Luftwaffe played a vital role by establishing air superiority, supporting
the ground troops at the front, bombing important targets deep behind enemy
lines and keeping the enemy under constant observation with its recon planes.

The Red Air
force suffered great losses in 1941-42 but in the period 1943-45 it was rebuilt
and it managed to play an important role in the actual fighting.

Until
recently studies of the air war in the Eastern front were hampered by the lack
of adequate sources for both participants. Authors either had to rely on the
surviving Luftwaffe records, which meant they would have to use German
estimates of Soviet strength and losses instead of the actual data, or they were
forced to use the official Soviet post war histories, which downplayed Soviet
defeats and exaggerated German strength and losses.

The main
strength of the book is the addition of detailed tables on the strength, loss
and sortie statistics for both sides. After the fall of the Soviet Union the
government archives were opened to researchers and new material on WWII has became
widely available. Hooton was able to take this data and incorporate it into his
book, thus offering detailed and most of all reliable information for both air forces.

Sunday, November 12, 2017

All the major
powers of WWII used tanks and especially in North Africa and in Europe they
played an important role in the actual combat operations. Some of these tanks
like the German Tiger were famous for their combat record, while others like
the Soviet T-34 and American M4 Sherman were produced in huge numbers.

However both
during the war and afterwards British tanks were criticized for being inferior.
The design and combat performance of British WWII tanks is a subject that has
received attention by historians and several authors like Correlli
Barnett, David
Fletcher and Peter
Beale are critical of British tanks.

The new book
‘British
Tank Production and the War Economy, 1934-1945’ by Benjamin
Coombs covers the administrative and production history of the British tank
program in WWII and its greatest strength is that it tries to explain why
certain decisions were made and what effects they had regarding production
numbers, tank quality and combat performance.

The book has
the following chapters:

Introduction

1. Government and Industry during
Disarmament and Rearmament

2. Government and Industry during
Wartime

3. General Staff Requirements and
Industrial Capabilities

4. The Tank Workforce and Industrial
Output

5. Overcoming Production Problems and
Delays

6. Influence of North America upon the
British Tank Industry

Conclusion

A great
review is available at amazon.co.uk by user ‘VinceReeves’ so I’ll repeat it here:

‘This is a long-needed objective view
of British tank production during World War II that finally manages to eschew
the hysteria and nonsense that generally attends this subject. Coombs
chronicles the evolution of tank design, and the shifting priorities of
production with authority and objectivity, and demonstrates how much
misunderstanding has attended the controversies over real and perceived quality
issues and inefficient tank production.

Basically, British tank production
underwent three stages during the war; an early stage in which tank production
was downgraded in favour of more vital air defence work, a second stage in
which quality was sacrificed to boost quantity production to rectify numerical
deficiencies, and finally a mature third stage in which quality was emphasised,
and British tanks became more effective and reliable.

Coombs makes sense of what appear to be irrational decisions to continue the
manufacture of obsolete tanks long after they were required - more often than
not this was undertaken to keep production facilities and skilled labour within
the tank programme so that they would be available when newer tanks were ready
for introduction.’

If you are
interested in military history and you want to learn more about the British
tank program then this book is a valuable resource.

For me the
value of the book is that it helps explain German victories in N.Africa in
1941-42. The Germans benefited by fighting against an opponent whose tanks
constantly broke down. In the period 1943-45 the British tanks became more
reliable because a determined effort was made to thoroughly check and fix flaws
and a high priority was assigned to spare parts production.

Thursday, November 9, 2017

I have one more
essay that I’m going to upload and it covers, in some detail, the compromise of
State Department communications in WWII.

Ideally I would
like to get a copy of the Carlson-Goldsberry
report from the NSA’s FOIA office but if that doesn’t happen soon I’ll just
go ahead and post it anyway. If I need to update it I’ll do so in 2018.

Thursday, November 2, 2017

After the
Allied victory in WWI, the leaders of the US, UK and France imposed harsh peace terms
on the defeated Germans. Germany (and the other defeated Central Powers)
had to make reparations to the Allied countries.

The problem
was that the payments that the German government was supposed to make were so
great that they would bankrupt the country. Due to German unwillingness and
inability to service the payments the Allies resorted to military measures such
as the occupation
in 1923 of the Ruhr industrial area.

In order to
defuse the situation and find a realistic solution to the reparations problem
the Dawes Plan was
implemented. Allied troops would leave the Ruhr area and the German government
would resume payments, after receiving a US loan that would revitalize the
German economy.

In Germany
the Allied representative responsible for monitoring the German compliance with
the Dawes plan was mr Seymour Parker
Gilbert and his official title was Agent
General for Reparations by the Allied Reparations Commission.

It seems that
the German government closely monitored Gilbert’s communications and was able
to solve some of his encrypted traffic to New York (Federal Reserve bank),
Paris and Rome.

Documents of
the German Foreign Ministry’s decryption department Pers Z, captured at the end
of WWII, show that his messages were solved by the German codebreakers: